July 2004

At the end of 2008, musician Taylor Deupree wrote that he would start a new project on January 1, 2009: recording one new sound a day. He explains that he "will carry a small digital audio recorder with me every day of the year and record one sound per day throughout 2009. (...) this exercise will not only force me to listen more carefully every day, but open my own sound palette, expanding into field recording."He continues, avoiding the upper-case:

i will not set a time limit on each day’s recordings, but rather make each recording as long as it needs to be to capture whatever it is i’ll be capturing. along with the recorder i will carry a small notebook and make a note of date and time as well as location and "subject."

After all, he concludes, "2009 will be a year of listening."The first dozen or more sounds are already up; you can listen to them at his blog. Note that you can play several files simultaneously, so it's quite interesting to move up and down the page and start different files at different times; the blog becomes a kind of musical instrument made of field recordings, used-defined audio landscapes on demand. You can listen to melting snow, a small stream, the inside of Grand Central Station, sand on the beach in Hawaii, and so on – acoustic snapshots of life on the planet. Note that Deupree is also a photographer; some of his work is really fantastic. He also once produced an album with Savvas Ysatis called Tower of Winds, inspired by the inner electronic programming of Toyo Ito's Tokyo building.

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Steve, you actually gave me some of Deupree's music a while back, maybe when I first moved up here; and I used to play his Tower of Winds CD a lot on my student radio show back in the day. Small world!

a note from a life of listening... I suggest also to have a look at sites like radio aporee - maps and soundtransit where field recordings from all over the world are contributed, creating open pools of sounds, mutating them into composted soundscapes from the real to the unreal.

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BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.